I've been using BTC Guild for a while to minimize variance, which may not be quite as good from a network-security standpoint (though they're currently less than a third of the network). P2Pool would be the ultimate in decentralization. I've used it in the past, but started running into performance issues on the hardware I had available. I think I'd need to at least throw more RAM and/or an SSD at it to get bitcoind to respond in a more timely manner to the queries P2Pool throws at it.
I moved to eligius and am seeing 590-600GH average from my 3 antminers (375,400,400 MHz)
Everyone seems to be getting very good hash rate out of the units, yet to see any dead chips.
one unit has a single chip with an x (it had about 4 that seemed caused by the pool switch but cleared by a reboot) and is at 200GH. If the chip is actually not working, the hashrate loss is minimal.
i plan to reconfigure some of the power lines and cooling soon and that should help bring temps down from 51-53 to 50-51